Steaming outside and inside!

 It is so durn hot and humid outside this summer.  It seems like it's been miserable way longer than normal.  Perhaps my perceptions are a bit skewed, I don't know, but it does seem like this excessive heat has been much more persistent this year.  At any rate, it's steaming hot outside and as a consequence, I don't much feel like cooking and heating up the inside of our home.  Eating out, cold foods, BBQ on the deck, the microwave, the pressure cooker, and the new steamer are great ways to cook without heating up the kitchen too much.  Another real neat tool is camp style cooking outdoors.  We have a nifty charcoal cooker, called a volcano.  It is designed to cook using your dutch oven.  Tonight, I'm setting it up to fix biscuits and I may make a dump cake as well since you can stack cook dutch ovens in the volcano.  More on this later.

Well, I have steamed fresh corn on the cob from the Farmer's Market, oatmeal, hard-boiled eggs, and frozen green beans with carrots and potatoes.  All were very good.  I hope that you will think about the cook ware in your kitchen and consider using your steamer/rice pot for more than just cooking rice.